A Stillness in Bethlehem(34)

Cara didn’t seem to have spent much time noticing the dark. She came stomping into the newspaper office, her cheeks rosy, her eyes bright. She was a plain girl and not one Amanda cared for much—she was too ambitious, for one thing, and too likely to cut corners to get what she wanted—but this time her excitement was attractive. She was waving a piece of paper in one of her gloved hands, so Amanda assumed she wanted to place an announcement or an ad. Amanda went behind the ad counter and waited.

“Oh, Amanda,” Cara said, twirling around on the heels of her snow boots. “You just won’t believe what happened. You just won’t believe what happened to me.”





2


Sharon Morrissey spent her late Sunday afternoons in the basement of the First Congregational Church, teaching reading to a small collection of old people who came in from the hills and back roads to expose themselves to this humiliation one day of every week. Most of her old people were women, all but two of them were white, and every last one of them was embarrassed. Sharon got past that by pulling the shades tightly down on the half-windows that looked out on the street and keeping the door shut. She got her old people moving by promising them they would be able to read the Bible in church on Christmas Day. There was now exactly one weekly session left before she’d have to make good on her promise, and she thought it was going to work out. Her group wasn’t ready to plunge into the more unfamiliar recesses of the King James Version, but they ought to do fine with the familiar Nativity narrative of St. Luke. It made Sharon feel as high as liquor ever had, and without the worry about waking up with a hangover. Everything about her involvement with the First Congregational Church made Sharon high. Sharon didn’t know what Congregational churches were like in general, but this one had been wonderful to her without being condescending, and she was grateful. Nobody had made a big fuss about what she was, one way or the other. Nobody had made a point of not making a big fuss about what she was. She and Susan had been accepted without comment or unease. The fact that the literacy project she was working in was sponsored by the First Congregational Church was another reason Sharon liked teaching her old people to read.

The one thing Sharon didn’t like about it was the walk home. Sharon walked home because Susan used the car on Sundays to go up and visit her mother in New Hampshire. Sharon and Susan didn’t visit together because Susan’s mother wouldn’t let them. Sharon could have asked Susan to pick her up at the church—Susan never stayed that long in New Hampshire—but it seemed like an unnecessary bother when it was perfectly safe to walk. The problem was, in order to get home, Sharon had to go down Main Street to Carrow and down Carrow to the Delaford Road, and when she did that she passed Candy and Reggie George’s house. The problem with passing Candy and Reggie George’s house was that the same thing was always going on inside it: Reggie was beating Candy into a pulp. The first time Sharon had heard this, she had done what she knew was the right thing to do. She’d marched straight home and called the cops. She even had to give Franklin Morrison credit. He’d come out. He’d thrown Reggie in jail. He’d taken Candy to the hospital. He’d done everything he could do without some cooperation from Candy herself, and Candy refused to give it. Sharon didn’t know if Vermont had a mandatory-charge law for battering or not—she had never been entirely sure what happened after Reggie and Candy had been carted off to their separate public institutions—but she had come to realize this: Without Candy’s cooperation, mandatory-charge law or not, it was going to be impossible to convict Reggie. The second time she had called, Franklin Morrison had asked her if she really wanted him to come out, and Sharon hadn’t blamed him. The time Franklin had come out, Reggie had put a load of buckshot in his knee that had messed him up for weeks, and what had he got to show for it? It was so frustrating, it made Sharon want to scream. Candy made Sharon want to scream. How could you go through life with so little self-respect? How could you get out of bed in the morning weighed down by so much fear?

Tonight, things were quieter than usual, but not quiet. Sharon wondered if they had gotten an early start. Candy seemed to be moaning. Reggie seemed to be slapping something, but not human flesh. Sharon thought what she was hearing was the sound of a belt being slapped against a wooden table. She stopped under cover of the Georges’ evergreen hedge and listened for a while, but that was all she could hear. She was glad she could hear Candy moaning. If she hadn’t been able to hear Candy doing anything, she would have been worried she was dead.